The use of cellular telephones in today's society has become widespread. While facilitating communication in a myriad of environments, the various existing and emerging wireless standards inhibit the ability to utilize a single device across the standards and platforms. The inability to have cross-platform coverage in a single device is due in large part to the inability to provide a hardware solution that can be adapted to varying standards.
For example, in terms of the channel coding operations that are necessary, existing and emerging wireless standards utilize myriad error mitigation techniques to operate in a hostile channel environment. Existing standards utilize two levels of coding plus block interleaving to address both single error and burst error phenomena. Group codes are used for the outer codes, and convolutional codes are used for the inner codes of the various concatenated coding schemes. No two standards employ the same combination. Additionally, certain standards employ encryption to offer a degree of privacy and security.
Utilization of an ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) approach for channel coding would be inefficient in such an environment, since there would need to have individual ASICs for supporting each possible standard. In addition, there would be an ongoing requirement to support modifications from an original design without the ability of having new silicon. A RISC (reduced instruction set computing) option is inefficient for the bit-oriented operations required for channel coding. Similarly, a DSP (digital signal processing) approach is also ill-suited to the bit-oriented requirements of channel coding. Use of a microprogrammed approach provides an arcane nature of programming and maintaining that precludes serious consideration as a solution. While FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) do provide flexibility, the high costs, both in transistor count and control overhead, outweigh their benefits.
Accordingly, a need exists for a channel coding approach that allows convenient, efficient, and effective support across multiple standards. The present invention addresses such a need.